Many phenomena that we observe in life are sought to be explained. Physicists seek to understand the ruling of our universe - why acceleration due to gravity is a balmy 9.8 metres per second per second or why the speed of light is 300 million metres per second. Similarly, creationists battle against evolutionists in the debate over the origins of life. And while an explicit explanation is the desire of many devout to their field, I contend that there is a much broader underlying phenomenon that has received little attention in the quest for the ultimate understanding of our world.
Many look at the processes of life, fascinated by its intricacies, and wonder how such a being, as complicated as it may be, could come to existence without the help of someone or something else. I argue that we are nothing more than the product of time and chance - without either, we are stagnant. We require time to allow for the progression of chance, and we require chance to explore all the permutations of our universe. In reality, it is only those combinations of both time and chance which stably interact that progress to the next moment of time.
In fact Darwin’s theory of evolution is nothing more than subset of this notion. The fittest of a species survive to reproductive maturity not because they hold better genes, but because they hold genes that are conducive to the environment that they’re in. Sucks for the fish that flopped onto land, but for the labyrinth fish whose swim bladder managed to oxygenate his blood, he might have been on to something.
But what about the confounding cosmological constants that govern our universe - surely they’re like this for a reason? Consider a universe of universes, or a universe filled with universes of universes - you get the idea - but that had one universe which represented a minute variation on each of the constants we observe today - variations on the four widely accepted fundamental forces - even better, an arbitrary number of fundamental forces. Each of these universes has the same potential to exist - that is to say that there is no bias toward one universe or another. Some universes would have constants so out of whack that matter as we know it could not exist there. Opposingly, some universes would have constants so in balance that matter condenses from energy ultimately giving rise to the heavenly bodies that we see in our universe. Our existence is not magic, its chance.
If life could not arise out of the conditions we find our universe to present, then we would not be here trying to understand them. It is by the simple nature that we can exist that allows us to exist.
Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 metres per second per second not because God picked it but because, in the universe where gravity is anything but that, there are no beings to sit under an apple tree to have an apple fall from it.
Leave a Comment